Church of St John the Baptist, Keynsham

The Church of St John the Baptist is the Anglican parish church of Keynsham, a town on the River Chew between Bristol and Bath in Somerset. Built around 1270 and designated a Grade II* listed building, it grew up in the shadow of the great Keynsham Abbey, and its long history takes in a collapsing spire, a tower said to be built from the abbey's ruins, a peal of bells from a famous local foundry, and a persistent legend linking it to George Frideric Handel.

There was a minster church at Keynsham by the ninth century, and in the twelfth century Keynsham Abbey was founded to serve the town. Around 1270 a separate church was built for the townspeople, with the abbey responsible for the chancel and the town for the rest — an arrangement that produced strained relations between monks and parishioners until the abbey's dissolution in 1539. The south aisle and porch date from 1390, and the chancel was rebuilt by the abbey in 1470. After the Dissolution the abbey site was bought by Sir Henry Bridges in 1552, and his descendants held the advowson into the eighteenth century.

The church took much of its present form under Charles II, after the spire over the north aisle collapsed into the building during a storm in 1632. The current three-stage west tower, raised over the north-east corner of the nave and crowned with a pierced parapet and crocketed pinnacles, is said to have been built from the ruins of the abbey church, and further restoration, including a new pulpit, followed in 1634–1655. The Civil War touched the parish too: the vicar Thomas Codrington received an increased stipend imposed on the royalist lord of the manor, but after the Restoration he reverted to the royal cause and persecuted the local Quakers who had supported Parliament.

By the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the congregation had dwindled and the fabric decayed — in 1843 the south porch was being used as a coal store and the roof leaked. Revival came in the 1850s with the vigorous vicar George Robinson, who rebuilt the vicarage for his thirteen children, founded a church school, and raised some £4,000 for a restoration carried out largely by the architect Benjamin Ferrey in 1861–63, removing the box pews, rebuilding the nave arches and re-roofing the church. His successors continued the work, expanding the church's local and overseas charitable mission, and in the twentieth century, as Keynsham grew with the building of the Somerdale chocolate factory, the parish founded a new daughter church of St Francis and, in the 1970s, adopted a team ministry.

The church holds a notable collection of fittings: a pulpit and choir-vestry screen of 1634, a small font given by Harry Bridges in 1725, and three brass chandeliers presented by Mrs Ann Tilly in 1717, hanging in the eight-bay nave beneath its hammerbeam roofs. Its bells are among its treasures, five of the eight surviving the spire's collapse in 1632: the Great Bell paid for by Nicholas St Loe in 1508, a Sanctus Bell of 1531, and others of the early seventeenth century, with two added in 1731 by the Bilbie family of nearby Chew Stoke, the smallest cheerfully inscribed "I value not who doth me see / For Thomas Bilbie casted me." The bells were recast by White's of Appleton and electronically tuned by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in 1987.

The church's most colourful tradition concerns its organ. A former instrument, the story goes, had tones so mellow that George Frideric Handel bargained for it around 1730, offering a peal of bells in exchange — and the deal was struck, the composer carrying off the organ while the bells were delivered. The tale is unsubstantiated, but it has clung to the church for centuries; the present organ traces its origins to a George Sherborne instrument of 1847, much enlarged and rebuilt since. One of four churches in the Parish of Keynsham within the Diocese of Bath and Wells, St John the Baptist remains the venerable mother church of the town — minster, abbey church and parish church in turn, its abbey-stone tower still rising over the Chew.